Articles by Josh

I read about Dr. Arguelles’ shadowing method long ago on the forums at howtolearnanylanguage.com, but I recently “rediscovered” the method when Geoff linked to Dr. Arguelles’ relatively new site.

Here’s a description of shadowing from Dr. Arguelles’ language study page:

This video [on the page linked above] demonstrates the proper form for using my technique of shadowing or listening to and simultaneously echoing a recording of a foreign language.

In order to shadow most effectively, it is important to observe three points:

1. Walk outdoors as swiftly as possible.
2. Maintain perfectly upright posture.
3. Articulate thoroughly in a loud, clear voice.

I’ve tried doing this with a few Assimil French lessons, and I was surprised by what I found. I did it with lessons I did quite some time ago, lessons which I felt I knew quite well. Simply reading the lessons out loud without shadowing, it felt easy. However, when I tried shadowing them, I discovered that it was far more difficult. I’d practically trip over my own tongue trying to keep up with the native speakers, struggling to say things that I thought I could say quite well.

I like the idea behind shadowing, which, if I understand Dr. Arguelles correctly, works a bit like learning to sing a song. As you listen to the audio and echo it, as long as you’re not tone deaf, you’ll automatically correct your pronunciation to match your speech with what you’re hearing. I’m well acquainted with this idea when it comes to music, as when I sing along with a song in which the singer has an accent, I copy that accent without really meaning to. Trying to force myself to sing without their accent actually feels rather weird, and I can’t do it for very long.

I’m going to keep trying the technique and see if it helps me any. Have you tried shadowing before, and if so, what were your experiences with it?

If you’re interested in the method, you might want to also check out a couple of threads at howtolearnanylanguage.com, in which Dr. Arguelles answers many questions about the method:

• How does shadowing help improve fluency?
• The original thread with the shadowing demonstration video, along with questions and answers

I recently came across lingro.com through my ‘net travels, and while it could be improved in many areas, it’s already one of my favorite tools. While the site has a regular dictionary look-up, what I really love is the overlay feature (or “web viewer” as they call it). You go to lingro.com, select your target language, and enter a website URL; once the page loads, every word on the page is clickable. Click one, and a pop-up window appears with the meaning of the word. There’s also a toolbar at the bottom of the window that you can type a word into, to look up a word that isn’t on the page. (It’s also helpful to look up compound words, as many that are logical in nature don’t have a unique entry.) Here’s what it looks like:

Once you’ve made an account, Lingro keeps track of all of the words you look up. It also maintains a list of all of the sentences that the words appeared in, which makes it all that easier to add sentence items to your SRS application (I recommend Anki).

The site also has a rudimentary flashcard system, but it really is that: rudimentary. I’ve already poked the developers to add an “export” feature.

The dictionaries themselves are all open source, meaning they’re free, and they always will be. Furthermore, they’re largely user-built, so if you hit a word that isn’t in the dictionary you’re using, add it. If you’ve ever used the German dictionary dict.cc, Lingro works more or less the same way. The definitions aren’t always as good as you’d find in a commercial dictionary, but the ease of use - click the word, get a definition - still makes it a worthwhile tool.

Lingro currently has dictionaries for English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Polish and Swedish.

I’m been thinking about exposure to language versus studying language, and I’m curious as to how you all balance it out. In reflecting, I realize that I’ve a tendency to use the vast majority of my language time on studying the language in some way or another, with little time spent on simple exposure.

An example of this is that I’ve spent relatively little time in just listening to German, with no further agenda. I’ve rarely tuned in to German radio stations or listened to podcasts without the intent to make it into a lesson or study session of some sort. If I have the transcript available, as is the case with podcasts from Deutsche Welle, I’ll print it out and read it as I listen, marking words and structures I don’t recognize. If I don’t have such a transcript, I’ll listen with pen and paper in hand, ready to jot down unknown words.

I’ve done the same thing with written material. I’ve never really just read German news articles, I’ve made them into assignments: usually, I’d go through the article, underlining words I don’t know, with a sheet of paper at my side (or a document open on my computer) to put the definitions and notes on.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with doing this. It’s obviously beneficial to “work” with articles or other materials in your target language. But I think I’ve gone way too far with it, and need to incorporate more simple exposure - just reading and listening to the languages I want to learn, without placing any burden on myself to go further with the activity.

How do you all balance this out? Do you do a lot of listening and reading without actually “studying” the material? No vocabulary lists, no notes? If you do, how beneficial have you found it?

I received an newsletter today from the university I attend, and they’re (finally!) offering a German course. It’s offered this fall, and I’ve gone ahead and signed up for it. It’s just an “elementary” German course, so I’m not really sure how much I’ll learn, but I’m still looking forward to it. At least it’ll put me in a position where I have to use the language some; while corresponding with people online in German is quite helpful (not to mention enjoyable), it’s not quite the same as talking directly to someone, face to face.

I just hope the class moves fairly quickly. If it’s really slow, I may go mad. 15 weeks of reciting basic verb conjugations does not sound fun.

I just put in “language learning” at Google, and discovered that the top result is Rosetta Stone. Seeing it made me curious - what do you folks think of the software? I’ve used it before, and didn’t much like it. Perhaps I didn’t spend enough time with it, though. I’m admittedly turned off a bit by the fact that, unless I’m mistaken, you can go through all of the levels for any language they offer, and never see “hello”, “how are you”, etc. If I’m wrong about that, though, someone please correct me!

I’ve not updated this blog for a while now, but I suppose I at least had good reason: it was the end of the semester at school, and for a while, I didn’t have time to study any new language material, let alone update the blog. The semester is now over and I’m getting back into the language groove, and so new posts should be forthcoming again.

Due to my “pause” on language learning, I haven’t made much progress with French Assimil, and I’ve certainly not accomplished the recommended one lesson per day; I’m now closing in on lesson 70 of the program. Despite my break, though, I’m not having any trouble on understanding the lessons in the second wave, so I suppose the break didn’t hurt me much. I did at least pick up the book every few days and read over a few lessons; I also listened to some lessons, but never actually sat down and studied any of it.

For German, I’ve been reading different things and nabbing vocabulary, along with entering vocabulary from Using German Vocabulary. There’s not much to say about that, other than that I’ve definitely noticed that as I now have German-English and English-German cards, my retention of the words is far better than it was when all I used was German-English. Right after the end of the break, I also requested a German language partner via eTandem, a language exchange site I’ve used in the past. If you’ve never done a language exchange, do check it out; it’s a great way to work on your language(s), as well as make some new friends.

… but luckily for me, I’m not a cat.

In my stats, I see that someone - I assume a professor - linked to my blog here for one of his or her classes, via an installation of Blackboard. The installation of Blackboard in question is on the Brigham Young University - Idaho website. I can’t see what was linked to, and the curiosity is really getting to me. If someone who clicks over to my site from Brigham Young University, drop me a comment and tell me what it is that’s linked to in your Blackboard area, please.

I’ve written in the past about my attempt at using word lists, and if you’ve kept up with those posts, after reading this one, you’ll probably think I suffer from split personality syndrome. But, I can at least say I’m being honest here.

I’ve gone back to Using German Vocabulary and am adding words - lots of them - to Anki. No sentences; indeed, I’ve added no extra context unless it was needed with a particularly ambiguous word. The result? It’s working extremely well. I’ve added nearly the whole first chapter, which, while I can’t give an exact number, probably hovers around a total of 500-600 words. The vast majority of them are sticking in my memory quite well. Some words, particularly those that have a few siblings which are similar in form and nearly identical in meaning, have given me some headaches (Bettbezug, Bettzeug, I’m looking at you!). Overall, though, most of the words I’ve been able to memorize after a few appearances in Anki.

So, what’s different? I said before that I kept forgetting word pairs that I added to Anki, right?

Well, the difference is, I did something I should have been doing from the start: I enabled Recognition and Production cards in Anki. Previously, with all of the material I added to Anki, I was doing Recognition only - see the foreign word, think of the (often rough) equivalent in English. I’m not sure where I got the idea of leaving out production cards - I think it might have been All Japanese All The Time (but don’t quote me on that).

I’ve found this time around though, that the production stage is where you really get to prove your mettle. It’s far easier to look at a foreign word and say “yeah, I understand that perfectly!” than it is to be given a word in your native tongue and to produce a foreign equivalent.

But Why?

I used to think that learning vocabulary in context was the way to go - that is, the only way to go. I still view it in a good light, and it still makes up a large part of my language learning regimen. However, as I’ve used Using German Vocabulary, even just adding all of the words from the first chapter - out of 20! - I’ve realized just how many words in English I take for granted. You can see what I mean by skimming through the English-to-Whatever-Language-You’re-Learning section of your dictionary. I never realized how many English words I knew until I looked at how many German equivalents I needed to learn to have a decent command of the language. And by decent, I mean knowing simple words like broom and kitchen sink, words which I didn’t know until I started going through the vocabulary book.

It’s words like those that lead me to be hesitant to vouching solely for contextual vocabulary learning. I’ve read a lot of articles in German, but unless I’m reading about housecleaning or home renovation, how often am I going to see der Besen or das Spülbecken? Probably not that often at all. And yet these are words that we all pretty much take for granted - every native speaker of English knows broom and kitchen sink.

So, for me, the reason to go through the (at times boring, I’ll admit!) process of adding huge numbers of word pairs to Anki is simple efficiency. I can learn more words in an hour with this method than I’d learn in three or more hours with reading articles or books. Taking the “brute force” approach lets me cover a lot of different ground, covering all sorts of everyday words that I need to know. With most of them, with a few key words added, I can make sure I don’t get things confused due to a lack of context. For example, I recently added die Umgehungsstraße - bypass to Anki. While the Recognition portion would be easy, simply seeing bypass could be troublesome - what kind of bypass? Are we talking about heart surgery here? By simply changing it to bypass (think cars!), I avoid any stupid word confusion.

Furthermore, by using large thematic lists from a book, I avoid the issue I mentioned above: if you rely solely on articles and other reading for vocabulary, if the word doesn’t show up in something you read, you don’t know it. Period.

While I’m not going to set anything in stone at this point, if my luck with this process using the above-mentioned book continues, I may make “word hoarding” one of the first steps in approaching a new language. Inadequate vocabulary has been my number one problem with German, and I think a systematic approach like this may be the solution to said problem.

I discovered through the WordReference Forums today that the whole Grimms Deutsches Wörterbuch, which consists of 32 volumes, is available for free online. The project page for this is here; the direct link to the dictionary itself is here.

The Grimms Deutsches Wörterbuch is rather like the Oxford English Dictionary, except that it’s for German (obviously). I’m not sure as to how helpful it would be in actual language learning, but I’m sure it’d still be fun to dig around through. You can read more about the dictionary and its history here.

I’m now up to lesson 56 in Assimil’s French with Ease, and, having done about a week’s worth of the “active wave”, I wanted to comment on it.

As I’ve mentioned before, Assimil’s approach consists of a passive wave and an active wave. The passive wave consists of listening to the dialogue, reading over the transcripts and the translations, as well as the notes. The active wave, which starts when you reach lesson 50 in the passive wave, has you go back to lesson 1 and translate from English to French. Before doing so you’re supposed to listen to the lesson.

I’ve had no trouble at all in doing these, but I must say - I think the second wave needs to consist of more than just translating from English to French, and doing a few exercises like filling in the genders of nouns or putting the right ending on adjectives. For an “active wave”, it seems too cursory, a mere add-on to the passive wave rather than a stand-alone part of the course.

That’s not to say that Assimil is bad; on the contrary, I still love the course, and intend to keep using it as my primary material for French. However, I think I may end up altering their prescribed approach rather drastically. I may add all of the sentences to Anki to strengthen my vocabulary, as well as write them all out by hand (which I’m finding helps me remember things much easier). I may also start working through The Ultimate French Review and Practice, a book I received recently. In short, now that I’m in the “active phase” of Assimil, I think I need to dig into things a little more; my passive understanding of the French lessons I’ve done is excellent, but my production skills are more-or-less nonexistent, and I’m not sure Assimil’s official “active phase” approach is going to change that much.

Has anyone worked through an Assimil course exactly as they recommend? If you have, could you comment on the end results?

There’s a company called Champs-Elysées, which makes four different audio magazines for language learners: Champs-Elysées, Puerta del Sol, Acquerello italiano, and Schau ins Land. Each issue of the audio magazines comes with a CD or cassette tape (around an hour long), along with a small magazine. In the magazine, there is a complete transcript of the audio on the left page, with vocabulary words in bold; on the right page are the vocabulary words and definitions. Throughout the text there are endnote numbers, which refer to the back of the magazine, where lots of cultural / news information is given in English.

Sounds great, doesn’t it? They are pretty nice, I’ll admit. I had a subscription to Schau ins Land at one point (which, at the time, amounted to 5 issues per year), and quite enjoyed them.

The problem, however, is the price. For 6 issues of Schau ins Land, you’ll be paying a hefty $129. If you want the study supplements for each issue, add on another $30. Assuming you don’t want the latter, you’re still paying $129 for 6 hours of audio, along with the transcripts, the select translations, and the cultural information in the back. Considering the aim of the magazines - to help learners improve their German - while the cultural stuff in the back can be interesting, it doesn’t really add much language learning value to the package. So, one could argue that, at least in regards to language learning, you’re paying $129 for 6 hours of audio, transcripts, and translations of the trickier words.

This may have been a decent deal years ago, but in my opinion, it’s rather steep now, considering how many free, high-quality resources are online. I’ve mentioned it before, but I’d argue that Deutsche Welle’s offerings trump Schau ins Land, and Deutsche Welle is all free. They have four podcasts which all have studio-quality audio (they are, after all, made in a studio ), complete with transcripts and, in the case of one, vocabulary lists:

• Top Thema mit Vokabeln (main page; archive) - This is the one that has vocabulary lists for each article (as anyone could probably guess from the name of it ). Note: the definitions are given in German.
• Sprachbar (main page; archive)
• Alltagsdeutsch (main page; archive)
• Stichwort (main page; archive)

The Top Thema mit Vokabeln podcasts usually come out a couple times a week; they’re 2-3 minutes long each, and the archive for them goes back to April 2004. With some very rough math - an average 2.5 minutes per episode, with episodes coming out twice a week - it comes out to about 21 hours of audio. I can’t give the rough amount of time that the others total up to, as the archive pages for them are done alphabetically instead of based on date. Sprachbar and Stichwort episodes all hover around 4 minutes each; Alltagsdeutsch comes in at around 15 minutes apiece. Suffice to say, add it all up, and there is a lot of material here.

It’s really hard for me to recommend Schau ins Land to anyone when such a comparison is done. To be fair, I do think that the translations in Schau ins Land are a little better than provided with Top Thema, because they’re in English, and generally speaking, Schau ins Land provides a higher number of word translations per paragraph of text. But, I’m no stranger to looking up words in a dictionary, just as anyone else who’s understanding of German is good enough to use Schau ins Land. So for me, I suppose it comes down to: is having the transcript in a pretty little magazine with copious endnotes in the back worth $129 per year for 6 episodes?

I’m afraid I’ll have to say Nein, danke to that.

I’ve recently throttled back on studying Russian, largely because I feel that I just don’t have enough time to continue enlarging my German vocabulary, learn the basics of French with my Assimil course, and learn the basics of Russian. I’ve not ran into any troubles in continuing with German and starting with French, probably because when I started French, I was quite familiar with most, if not all, of the grammar of German, and had a decent sized vocabulary. My German learning now consists of just learning more (and more) vocabulary; there aren’t any new concepts being added.

Trying to learn the basics of two drastically different languages has proven a bit more difficult. For French, I’ve been usually spending 30-45 minutes a day, doing one Assimil lesson a day. I don’t really have enough time in the day to spend a similar amount of time on Russian as well, and doing anything less, I feel like I’m making little to no progress. There’s so much to cover when starting a new language, and with the Russian declension system, it seems even worse. With the limited amount of time I’ve been able to give it, I feel as if I’ve done little more than learn enough to get things mixed up.

I think my attack plan at this point is going to be to finish the Assimil course, which, if reports from folks online are trustworthy, will give me a very good base in French on which to build. Perhaps at that point I’ll be able to continue with German and French, and start over with Russian. I’m going to continue peeking at my Russian texts, but I’m not going to try and set any real goals for myself with it right now, because I think I’d just be setting myself up for failure.

In short, I believe that, in jumping in with both French and Russian, I bit off more than I could chew.

As an aside (I’ll blog more about this soon), I’m nearing lesson 50 in the Assimil course, at which point I’ll start the second, or “active” wave. I’m looking forward to seeing how my understanding of the language progresses from that point on; thus far I’ve had a blast using the course, and I’m at least passively understanding everything. Most importantly, it’s been fairly painless work - the Assimil course is fun, which is not something I can say of cramming grammar tables.

I’ve been doing a lot of listening to German lately, mostly podcasts. I’ve been listening to Alltagsdeutsch from Deutsche Welle, along with two from Annik Rubens, Slow German and Schlaflos in München. To perhaps stop other German learners from going mad with frustration, I thought I’d point something out: either the variety of stuff I’ve listened to thus far is misleading, or Annik Rubens speaks extraordinarily fast in Schlaflos in München.

For a long while, I thought it was that my ears just weren’t accustomed to normal speaking speeds; I thought I just needed more exposure to the spoken language. The more I listen though, the more I think Annik just talks really, really fast. In Alltagsdeutsch, there are often large segments in each podcast where they’ve interviewed people on the street, and I can usually understand these people just fine. While I very rarely understand the meaning of everything they say, I am at least able to understand what they’re saying, so I can look up the unknown words. With Schlaflos in München there will often be segments of each podcast that I just can’t understand at all - the words are flying by so fast I can’t pick any out, they’re just a bunch of syllables squashed together.

This, of course, is not an “attack” or any such thing on Annik Rubens. It’s her podcast, and she should be allowed, if you will, to talk however she wants. After all, she makes a specific Slow German podcast for us learners. I do think, though, that learners might find it useful to know that, in my opinion, her speaking speed is not representative of the normal speed at which Germans speak. If you listen to a few episodes of Schlaflos in München and suddenly feel as if your listening skills have taken a lunge backwards, try listening to something else. It may very well be the material, not you.

Can anyone else comment on this? Have you noticed it as well? Could a native German have a listen at Annik’s site, and let me know if I’m crazy or not?

I wanted to add a little bit more to my previous post about words in context vs. word lists. I said in my last post that going through and adding word lists to your SRS application, like Anki, could be effective, if only you could bring yourself to do it. At this point, however, I’m thinking words without context are perhaps more trouble than they’re worth, even if you can bring yourself to adding them to your SRS program.

Before I became dreadfully bored with the process, I had added 40 or 50 German words from Using German Vocabulary to my Anki deck. They’ve been in my deck for a few weeks now, and I’ve noticed a rather blatant trend: I keep outright forgetting these words, or getting them completely wrong, whereas with words that are in context, I rarely forget them completely, and only very occasionally will I make a mistake in remembering them. Some of the words that I’ve added without context, I’ve forgotten completely 3 or 4 times.

Die Kommode is one example of one of the words I’ve “lost” repeatedly. It means “chest of drawers”, something rather simple, but everytime die Kommode would pop up in Anki, I’d blank on it, or think of something similar - a coatrack, a closet, etc.

A couple of days ago I added some context to the card, changing it to die Schubladen der Kommode aufziehen (essentially “to open the drawers of the chest [of drawers]“), and the word seems to be sticking well now. It hasn’t been long enough to see if the context makes a long-term change, but I expect it will.

So, I have to reiterate something that I’ve seen elsewhere many times: while it may take a bit more time to find example sentences / phrases for the words you’re trying to learn, they really do seem to make a difference.

I wrote previously about word lists vs. words in context, and said that I thought for a lot of words, context just wasn’t needed much. This is especially true of concrete nouns. A bakery is a bakery, whether you say “bakery” or “die Bäckerei,” a library is a library, whether you say “library” or “die Bibliothek.”

But…

One aspect I didn’t really think about when I was writing that post was the issue of enjoyment during study. I checked out Using German Vocabulary, which consists almost entirely of thematic word lists, with some exercises / authentic German material after each unit, from the university library. I had the intent of systematically adding all of the words in it to my SRS application, Anki. The book has a huge number of everyday words, and so I figured learning all of them would be a good thing.

Except… I’m not doing it. The book has sat on the shelf for a while now, while I’ve continued yanking whole sentences from news articles and from my monolingual German dictionary. Why? Mostly because sitting and typing in word after word into Anki isn’t a great deal of fun, whereas reading articles and slowly increasing my understanding via learning new words, is.

Maybe a dual approach is needed - use the word lists in the book as a guide as to what to learn, but look up sentences for each word via Google or my dictionary. I’m hesitant to just toss out the book (or return it to the library, more specifically), because I’ve found that if I just read news articles and what not, I end up with large holes in my vocabulary, particularly words for everyday things. I’ve not read many articles which have dealt with bookshelves, shelves, sets of shelves, etc., which are all things I recently learned the German for, via the above-mentioned book.

Certainly, though, I don’t think just cramming word lists into Anki isn’t going to work for me, at least not as a long term learning practice. It’s effective - I could learn a lot of words in a short amount of time - but only if I can bring myself to do it, which I’ve failed at. Live and learn.

I read a post from Geoff today, The Language Habit, and I thought his point was worth repeating:

… [T]here is one old and earthshaking secret too often forgotten about all aspects of our lives: If you work at doing something as well as you can and consistently, you are on the way to excellence. So whatever your method or technique for learning language these days, stick to it. If it fits with what you’re trying to achieve, you’ll soon be on your way.

This is great advice. I’ve found that with language learning, often, what is lacking is not the “perfect” method, but simply enough time invested. With regular study, even if it’s 10 or 15 minutes, you can see improvement in your understanding. I’ve been extremely busy with college classwork, and so my language learning time has been pretty slim. However, I’ve been able to squeeze in 10-15 minutes a day for both French and Russian; German, as my primary language target, usually gets half an hour to an hour. While I certainly won’t win any language learning races by studying an hour and a half a day, luckily, I’m not in a race; I just want to continue learning, which I’ve been doing successfully. A drop here and there will eventually fill a glass, then a bath tub, and then an ocean. I suppose language learning is similar.

So, as Geoff said: stick to it. Even if it may feel like you’re not making much progress, you probably are. Just keep adding drops to the container.

I was rereading through the introduction to New French with Ease earlier this evening, and came across this gem of a quote from Rivarol:

Grammar is the art of lifting the difficulties out of a language; the lever must not be heavier than the burden.

Something to definitely keep in mind when studying a language; I know from experience how easy it is to get bogged down in the grammar, losing sight of what you’re really after: understanding, and the ability to communicate. Grammar is needed, but it’s a piece of the pie, not the whole thing.

By the way, if you’re curious, here’s the original French quote:

La grammaire est l’art de lever les difficultés d’une langue; mais il ne faut pas que le levier soit plus lourd que le fardeau.

I forgot to write a quick post on this at the time of it happening, so here’s that post a bit late:

Damien, the maker of Anki, has put out a number of updates over the past weeks. I wrote back in November of ‘07 that I had abandoned SuperMemo for Anki, due to its simplicity and cleanness of design (unlike the monumentally cluttered SuperMemo).

One of the updates that Damien released fairly recently added something that I was actually missing from SuperMemo: the ability to change the color of text in the cards. You could do this before for a whole side of a card, like making an entire sentence green or blue, but you couldn’t select individual words or other parts of the card and change their color. I prefer to emphasize what I’m learning in a sentence with a color rather than with bold or underlining; no real reason, just a preference I have.

Now I can do that.

If you’ve not checked out Anki yet, do so - it’s a great app. And, if you end up liking it, consider donating to the developer - he’s put a lot of time into the app, as well as helping users in the support forum. If you want to donate, there are PayPal buttons on the main Anki page as well as the download page.

I sat down a few minutes ago and flipped through a few pages of Using German Vocabulary, not really looking for anything in particular - just enjoying seeing new words, really. I landed in a section on the animal word. Looking over some of the words for animals and their associated parts, a couple of the words made me genuinely smile: das Nashorn, and der Stoßzahn.

Das Nashorn is basically “nose horn”, if you take the elements apart, and means rhinoceros. Der Stoßzahn is a little trickier. Der Stoß can mean a push, shove, punch, as well as stab or thrust. I suppose the most menacing literal translation of Stoßzahn would be stabbing tooth. To me, that has so much more character than tusk.

A little over a week ago, I went into the university library to pick up the copy of Using German Vocabulary that was waiting for me. As I work at the library as a reference assistant, the lady at the counter knows me. Seeing what book I was checking out, she asked: “Oh, do you speak German?”

Umm. Good question. One which, alas, I’m not really sure how to answer. I paused briefly, and then said, “Well, yeah, some - but.. well.. yeah.”

German is the foreign language I’ve been learning the longest, and I’d be lying if I said I haven’t been learning it in a from-here-to-there way - quite haphazard. And so when someone asks me, “Oh, do you speak German?”, the best I can say is “Yes, some” - which is truthful, but it certainly sounds rather lackluster, considering how many years I’ve been at it! I have an extremely difficult time gauging where exactly on the spectrum of “knowing German” I’m currently at. How far along do you have to be to be “allowed” to simply answer “Yes!” to “Do you speak [X]?”

Does anyone else have trouble with this, or am I just a peculiar one?

In poking around at the How to Learn Any Language forums, I’ve come across many good discussions on vocabulary acquisition. One of the things that the discussions usually revolve around is whether one should avoid using word lists, relying solely on items in context. For a long time, I had stuck strictly to context items, basing my usage of SuperMemo and Anki on the strategies given at antimoon.com. However, based on one of the forum member’s (Iversen) posts, I’ve been giving word-to-word cards in Anki a try, and they’re working well, depending on the type of word.

Iversen views wordlists (or simply learning L1-to-L2 and vice versa translations without context) as a stepping stone, not the end of the road. He figures (rightly, I think) that by exposing himself to the translations of words, when he encounters the words in context, he’ll either A) understand it correctly or B) have something to work with in regards to figuring out what the word does mean, if the translation he learned doesn’t work.

Furthermore, while I see the value in learning words in context, particularly verbs, with many words, the context just isn’t needed, because the usage in L2 corresponds so closely to the usage of its translation in L1. For example, do I really need context to understand der Hund (dog), die Stadt (city), der Korb (basket)? Certainly, by simply learning that der Korb means basket, I won’t be learning any idioms, but I wouldn’t be doing that anyway, even if I had a sentence with Korb in context. To learn the idiom I’d have to see it in context or look it up in a dictionary, and then add that to my SRS program.

I’m coming to see that it’s not really a matter of “words in context vs. wordlists.” Instead, I see them both as things which have their purposes along the way toward proficiency in a language. For many words, context is vital, and trying to learn the words without it is a waste of one’s time. An easy way to see this is to pull up the English-German translation of “to go.” Here’s the page for the translation at Reverso. For the vast majority of those words, you really need some context to figure out what exactly is going on.

On the other hand, for many words, context isn’t really needed. I think by obsessing over “words in context only!“, people have made it sound as if languages have no correspondences whatsoever, that if you learn the word der Hund, you better learn how it’s used. To that, I say: unless I’m missing something, dogs in German-speaking areas behave essentially like dogs everywhere else in the world. And, again, learning anything about a word in your target language, even if its a simplified idea about it which will be refined through reading and use, is better than learning nothing at all. (As can probably be gleaned from that last remark, I don’t go for the idea that making mistakes in your target language is devastating; if that were the case, no one would ever learn any foreign language decently - let alone their native tongue.)

I wanted to post and let those of you who are subscribed (a surprising number, considering my recent silence!) that things around here should be returning to normal. For those that don’t read my other blog, System 13, I’ve recently been busy studying for final exams and writing a term paper for one of my classes. The semester is now over, so I’ll have more time to do language stuff and post here.

I’ve been using Anki diligently, and am still enjoying the program far more than I ever enjoyed SuperMemo. However, I think I need to rethink my usage of it. I’ve mostly been putting in sentence items, based on the ideas presented at antimoon.com and All Japanese All The Time. However, I just came across this page on learning at the Anki website, which makes a fine case for more active recall items, rather than passive stuff. While I don’t have 10,000 items in Anki (AJATT puts forth the “10,000 sentences method”), I think I’ve made enough sentence items in SuperMemo and now Anki to see that they’re not making my production skills advance very much. When I abandoned SuperMemo I had about 600 items; I have about 300 in Anki. In both pieces of software, I was (or am) up to date on all of my reviews - in other words, I should “know” the words or whatever is of interest in each card. Did I in SuperMemo? Do I in Anki? No. I can understand the material, which is better than nothing, but I don’t think I could come close to producing even half of it if I needed to.

I was looking for a translation of a German word this morning (arbeitsreich), to see if I could find some examples of usage. At the top of the search results was this. The page answered my question, but more importantly, through it, I discovered that you can access Collins foreign language dictionaries online for free.

The dictionaries available from the site are:

• Collins Español-Inglès / English-Spanish
• Collins Chinese-English / English-Chinese
• Collins Deutsch-Englisch / English-German
• Collins Français-Anglais / English-French 2005
• Collins Português-Inglês / English-Portuguese
• Collins Italiano-Inglese / English-Italian
• Collins Russian-English / English-Russian
• Collins Polish-English / English-Polish
• Collins English Dictionary & Thesaurus

Quite the bundle!

In looking around at Babelhut.com, I discovered that my blog isn’t the only one entitled “Language Geek.” Indeed, on Babelhut’s blogroll, I’m “Language Geek 2,” logically appearing right after “Language Geek 1.” As I rightly should be, by the way; looking at Language Geek’s archives (the other Language Geek’s archives, not mine!), it appears they’ve been at language blogging since 2005. Drat. That makes me the name thief (even though it wasn’t intentional). And here I was, thinking I was the only one who (proudly) called himself a “language geek.” Oops.

Now I’m wondering whether I should change the title of my blog. What do you folks think? I don’t really want to, because I’ve obviously already bought the domain name, languagegeek.net. On the other hand, I hate to be called Language Geek 2 (or cause someone else to be called Language Geek 1!)

I suppose a subdomain or a simple addon folder (languagegeek.net/namethief) would be fine.

Suggestions?

I’ve finally given up on SuperMemo, the beefed up flashcard program I’ve been using for vocabulary acquisition. After having used it for a few months, I had become accustomed to its idiosyncrasies, if not having fallen in love with them. However, I was poking around in the forums at How To Learn Any Language, and came across a thread about SuperMemo alternatives. In it, there was a link to Anki - and there, I found true love (at least in regards to a piece of spaced repetition software).

Anki does everything that I used in SuperMemo. What it doesn’t do is cause me to pull out what little hair I have. Whereas SuperMemo was bloated beyond belief, with menus, sub-menus, and sub-sub-menus (I’m serious), Anki is pure simplicity. You add cards; you repeat them, grading how you did on remembering the answers; and Anki does the rest. There’s some basic customization available in the cards, such as bold, italics, and underlining, but there aren’t complex template registries; there are no branches; there are no leeches; in short, most of the “extra” stuff that’s in SuperMemo isn’t in Anki, and the program is better because of it.

Anki also has a quite useful feature that SuperMemo doesn’t have: you can sync up your data with an online version of the program. This will solve a problem I’ve had for a while now: how do I handle vocabulary that I want to put into SuperMemo when I can’t access SuperMemo? Between classes at the university, I often read foreign language articles. When I see vocabulary that I don’t know, I typically want to record it and learn it. However, not being able to access SuperMemo from home, I’ve been, up until now, saving the sentences and vocabulary into a Google Docs file, and then transferring them into SuperMemo at home. In essence, I’ve been doubling my work. Being able to add stuff into the online version and have it all sync up at home solves this problem wonderfully. By the way, even the online aspect of the program is free; it isn’t subscription based or anything like that.

My experiences with SuperMemo (and now Anki) highlight an important aspect of language learning: the tools you use. If you don’t like the tools you’re using, your language learning will suffer from it, guaranteed. I know that I’ve slacked on entering vocabulary lately, specifically because I’ve grown to dislike the clunky SuperMemo so much.

A new age has arrived. The age of Anki. Bye, SuperMemo. I won’t miss you.

Harold let me know that the Princeton Russian course, which I had made a torrent file for, is now available as a zip file from freelanguagecourses.com. I can assure you from experience that getting it from that site will be 1) much faster and 2) much less hassle, than it would be if you got it via the torrent.  You can locate the zip file link here; just pay attention to the stipulations for the download. (Basically, contact the creator and let him know you’re using it.)

Thanks, Harold!

Hey everyone. I wanted to drop a quick post here to let those of you who are still subscribed to the feed (a surprising number of you!) that I’ve not abandoned this blog. I’ve been extremely busy with classes, and both of my blogs (this one and System 13) have suffered because of it. But, one must have priorities.

I won’t, however, post here without writing at least a little bit about language. So:

I have long been frustrated with people thinking that modern words with an -e slapped on the end constitute “Old English.” (Or should I say “Olde English”?) I hear expressions from people surprisingly often, showing how little they know about the evolution of their own, native language.

The most recent case was when I was discussing Myne Owne Ground, a book I had to read for a class I’m in. As can be discerned from the extended title (Myne Owne Ground: Race and Freedom on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, 1640-1676), the book is concerned with 17th century Virginia. Throughout the book, there are excerpts from court cases, land grants, etc. Many of the words in these excerpts are spelled incorrectly or inconsistently, and a great deal of the words have an unneeded -e appended to the end.

When talking about this with a fellow classmate, he commented that, “Yeah, all of that Old English will get you everytime.” (I suppose he could have meant “old” as an antiquated, from a previous time, etc., but I seriously doubt it.) I just nodded and smiled, but I wanted to say: “Alas, no - that’s not Old English! You’re only about 5 centuries late. If I were to show you real Old English - Anglo-Saxon - you’d realize how silly you sound.”

Old[e] English, indeed.

I posted previously about the wonderful Russian courses available for free from Princeton. They have, however, recently taken the courses down. This happened once before in the past, and the courses were later put back up, but there’s no real way to know whether Princeton will do this again.

However - I have come to the rescue! Before the files disappeared, I had downloaded them all to my hard drive. I was able to contact the creator of the courses, David Freedel, and asked if he had any problem with me sharing them. He said, basically, “Nope, I don’t work at Princeton anymore - feel free to share them however you wish!”

So, I’ve created a torrent of the files. You can download the torrent here. Please note that, since I just created the torrent, I’m the only seeder - so you’ll need to be patient with the download! I’d also ask, if it’s not too inconvenient, that you please help seed the files, at least for a while, once you’ve downloaded them. That way the whole brunt of the downloads won’t be placed on my internet connection.

Enjoy!

UPDATE: I screwed up the creation of the torrent, using a tracker that won’t work. I’m recreating the torrent now; I’ll post a new link soon. Thanks for your patience.

UPDATE #2: Alright, here is the new torrent link. Please ignore the numbers (0 seeds, 0 leechers); I know for a fact they’re wrong. I checked the actual seeding files a few minutes ago, and there were 25 peers connected out of a total queue of 66. And I know there’s at least one seed - me.

I’ve not posted about how my language learning is going for a while now, so here’s the obligatory update.

My German is going extremely well. It’s mostly just an activity of vocabulary acquisition at this point. I’m familiar with all of the grammar, and can read most things with a bit of help from a dictionary. I’m still working on my listening comprehension, by regularly listening to German podcasts and audiobooks. I’m slowly chipping away at the German version of Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone, Harry Potter und der Stein der Weisen.

I’ve shuffled my learning plan around some in regards to Russian. I was initially just working with the texts I have, Russian for Beginners (Duff) and New Penguin Russian Course (Brown). While I was making so-so progress with them, I felt like I wasn’t really learning how to say anything. So, I’ve added in a final element, which comes with a huge amount of audio: the Princeton Russian course. I posted about this previously, and sadly, it appears Princeton has taken the course material down. However, I downloaded it all when it was available. I’m listening to one dialogue a day, repeatedly, until I understand it in full. I’ve already found that I was overpronouncing a lot of things, in particular, the y soft sound on е, ё, etc. Despite my efforts, I’m still finding that my progress with Russian is much, much slower than my progress was when I started learning German. However, I think from listening to the dialogues regularly from the Princeton course, I’m starting to get a better feel for the language.

Finally, I’ve decided to throw another language onto my list: French. I’m using the Assimil course, New French with Ease, and am loving every minute of it. For those not familiar with Assimil, the setup of the course is thus:

You have the audio portion, and the book. The audio is all in the target language. In the book, you have a transcript of each lesson on one side of the page, and the translation on the opposite page. There are also grammar and vocabulary notes for each lesson, but these are generally kept relatively short. You go at the material in two waves: the first passive, the second active. You do the first 50 or so lessons passively, simply listening and repeateding the audio, and making sure you understand all of it. Once you’ve reached lesson 50 or thereabouts, you go back to the beginning of the book, and go through the lessons “actively”, doing the exercises and translating from English to French. While doing this, you obviously continue on with the passive phase until you reach the end of the course. I’m about 10 lessons into the course now, and I really like it. I wish I’d started learning German with the Assimil course. I’d nab the Russian course, but they don’t offer a new version, at least not with English as the base version. I guess there’s not much market right now for English-speaking people wanting to learn Russian.

I just recently started reading A History of India for a course I’m taking at the university. I came across the expression bête noire in the book, in this sentence:

In this connexion there was another bête noire which cast its shadow on much of the early writing on ancient India.

Having not a clue as to what the phrase meant (other than the fact that noire meant ‘black’), I dutifully looked it up. According to wordreference.com (I currently have no proper French dictionary), I found that it means “peeve” or “pet peeve”.

Having said that, I must say: I find the habit of scholarly writers dropping in random expressions in other languages, without a translation thereof, a bit odd (not to mention rather frustrating at times). If there were a decent reason for using the foreign word, fine - but what was to be gained by the author by using the French version of “pet peeve”? I can obviously understand why there are, for example, many Sanskrit words in the text (usually with a definition or something similar, I might add!) - but French? I don’t see the point.

I’ve been studying German for 4 years or so now, and since I began, I’ve been pounding away with alt-code keys. Alt+0220 for Ü, alt+0246 for ö, etc. I just discovered something which will save me quite a bit of time: DeKey.

It’s a custom German keymap for Windows Vista or Windows XP, which allows you to easily type letters commonly used in German, e.g.:

ü, ö, ä, ß, «, », etc.

Instead of using the alt-codes, all you have to do is hold down the Alt key and hit the corresponding letter, so:

R-alt + u = ü
R-alt + a = ä
R-alt + shift + o = Ö

You can download the installer here; instructions on how to enable the keyboard are included in the zip file.

I wrote back in January about setting up my computer to allow me to type in Cyrillic. Setting it up was the easy part; the hard part was memorizing what English letters corresponded to what Cyrillic letters. The default Windows XP Cyrillic keyboard layout is the same one that is used in Russian-speaking countries - that is, there is little rhyme nor reason to how the letters are laid out on a keyboard based on the Latin alphabet. For example, the T key produces the Cyrillic Е, the Y key produces Cyrillic Н, and the W key produces the Cyrillic Ц.

Still having not mastered the Russian keyboard layout, I went hunting for a better solution - and found one. From this page, you can install a phonetic keyboard layout which makes a lot more sense. Instead of having to memorize the random (to English users) layout, with the phonetic layout, you only have to memorize the placement of 7 of the letters. The rest of them are fairly logical - for example, the D key produces Д, the U key produces У, and the S key produces С.

The fellow who maintains the site has a fairly complicated set of instructions, which I personally found to be too complicated. If you’re running Windows XP or Windows Vista, just do this:

1. Download this zip file, and unzip it to an easily accessible (and findable!) folder.
2. Go to the folder and double click setup.exe.
3. Wait.
4. That’s it.

You should now have, on your taskbar, a button that says “EN”. Click on it and click RU to switch to Russian. The keyboard layout that you’ll be using, when typing Cyrillic, will be this:

If, at any time, you wish to remove the phonetic keyboard, just return to the setup.exe file, double click it, and click Remove.

One of the books I’ve been reading recently is Medieval Europe: A Short History by Hollister. He uses, quite often, the abbreviation “f.” or “ff.”, for example:

The Golden Age of the Abbasids: 750 ff.

I wasn’t sure what the abbreviation meant, so I dutifully looked it up. It apparently means, simply, “and the following (pages, verses, years, etc.)”.

(The abbreviation can also stand for “fortissimo”, meaning “in a very loud manner”, but I’m fairly confident that that isn’t the meaning Hollister had in mind!)

My 3 year old recently acquired a liking for the kids’ show, Bob the Builder. He’ll often tell us in the morning: “I want to watch Bob Builder!” He always leaves out the definite article. However, the humorous bit is this: he can’t, for whatever reason, get the end “b” on Bob to come out quite right. Instead of the correct sound, he gets “mb” - thus, he says bomb instead of Bob. Which, of course, brings the full phrase to:

“I want to watch bomb builder!”

I certainly hope the FBI or Homeland Security hasn’t had a reason to bug our home; if they have, we’re going to have some explaining to do.

I recently started slowly reading through the first Harry Potter book in German. Last night, I ran into this sentence:

Mr. Dursley summte vor sich hin und suchte sich für die Arbeit seine langweiligste Krawatte aus, und Mrs. Dursley schwatzte munter vor sich hin, während sie mit dem schreienden Dudley rangelte und ihn in seinen Hochstuhl zwängte.

When I first read the sentence, I wasn’t sure what the verbs hinsummen and hinschwatzen meant. I knew what summen and schwatzen both meant, but I wasn’t sure what the prefix hin- transformed them to.  I looked around in my dictionaries, but saw nothing of any use.

I then decided to ask a native German speaker, and posted the sentence, along with my questions about it, to a German language forum I frequent. Within half an hour, I had my answer: the verbs aren’t hinsummen and hinschwatzen. Instead, the hin in both parts of the sentence belongs with the phrase vor sich hin, which means something like “to one’s self” or “by myself.”

The point, then? Often, it’s easier and quicker to simply ask a native about something than it is to dig through dictionaries, grammars, and notes. Certainly, I’m not saying you should constantly badger your native speaking friends with questions, but they are a wonderful help in learning a language. They often instinctively know how something should be said, even if they’re not sure of the grammatical reasoning behind it. They can also quickly dissect a sentence for you, whereas if you were doing it by yourself, you could spend quite a while figuring out which “bits” of the sentence go together, like in my example above.

I was wondering about something: why have I never seen the equivalent of a German Merriam Webster online?

For English, many commercial or professionally made dictionaries provide a free online version to anyone who wants to use it. The one that quickly jumps to my mind is the Merriam Webster online dictionary. For German, I’ve yet to see one - at least for native German speakers. Off the top of my head, the only German<->English dictionary that I can think of that is professionally created, available for free online, is PONS. However, there is no Langenscheidt Online, no Duden Online.
All of the other German<->English dictionaries that are online are user-created, dict.cc and dict.leo.org being the two major ones that I know of.

Are there dictionaries online for German speakers provided by German dictionary companies, or is the field a mere void? If so, I find that pretty odd.

I just noticed that I have a new incoming link to this blog, coming from Frodo Lives!. Frodo Lives! appears to be a very new language learning blog (the first post is from the 28th of July!) It looks like it’s going to be a nice language blog, so do check it out. If for no other reason, the fellow deserves a visit solely for using such a wonderful title. Anyone who is a Tolkien lover is okay in my book.

As for myself, no, I’ve not fallen off the planet. I’m still studying my languages, but I’ve just had not much to really say about that study these past few days. Most of my studying has been relatively uneventful (but fulfilling) vocabulary grunt work. I learned the genitive endings for singular nouns in Russian a day or two ago, but I still can’t really make up my own sentences yet. Patience, patience, patience. That’s what I keep telling myself.

No, I’ve not been resting on my laurels!

I’ve been chipping away at my Russian, and truly, I think chipping is the right word. I never make huge leaps with Russian, and I’d be lying if I said the beginning steps have been easy. They haven’t. I knew Russian was considered a difficult language, but I wasn’t quite expecting this difficult. But - by chipping away slowly at the mountain, hopefully, I’ll conquer it some day. And, I dare say, I am making progress. Slow, certainly, but it’s progress nonetheless.

Recently, I’ve gone back to the very beginning of my New Penguin Russian Course, and started reviewing everything very closely. While much of it I “know”, with a lot of it, I’d say I’m “familiar” with it, but I’ve not learned it by heart. Instead of plowing on through the book when my foundation is weak, I’m going back and pouring in more concrete to strengthen things up. I’m finding that things that I found totally baffling on the first go through are easier to grasp now.

Before I dropped back to the beginning to do a full review, I was working on chapter 7, which includes adjectives and the basic declensions of them. I at first found all of the explanations about the declensions to be confusing, but I found some clarity when, ironically, I turned to the back of the book and looked at the table of all of the possible declensions of an adjective. I found this to be rather humorous, as well as a sign that my skills at learning a language have become better (or perhaps just changed). When I started learning German years ago, I hated tables of endings, conjugations, etc. I found them to be too much. I preferred to be introduced to bits of grammar slowly. Now, at least when it comes to declensions, I prefer to look at tables so I can have a bird’s eye view of what’s going on. I will, of course, have to study each declension on its own and learn to use it properly, but I still find it helpful to see the full picture before digging in with the pieces of it.

I’ve also recently added a few more Russian language books to my repertoire. Not because the books I had (the New Penguin Russian Course and Kenneth Katzner’s Dictionary) were bad or not thorough enough, but because I’d like to be able to tackle the language from different viewpoints. As the language addict recently remarked:

Most language textbooks take similar but not identical approaches to language learning, and teach similar but not identical vocabulary.

The two books I bought are:

• Russian for Beginners by Charles Duff - Similar, but far from identical, to Nicholas J. Brown’s Penguin course. I’m finding that some of the grammar explanations in Duff’s book are more thorough and exact than Brown’s book, but Brown’s book has its bonsues as well. I think these two books will play off of each other nicely.
• Dictionary of Spoken Russian by the U.S. War Department - The big lure of this book for me was that all of the words have multiple example sentences, showing the word in real use. It is indeed a bit dated, but I’d say it will still prove extremely helpful, particularly when I start entering the words and example sentences into one of my vocabulary programs. As an aside, Katzner’s dictionary also has example phrases and sentences for almost all of the words in it. Context, context, context - so important for learning new words!

Geoffrey of Confessions of a Language Addict has tagged me for a meme. Essentially, the meme asks the participants to list 8 things about themselves, and then “tag” 8 other people. I won’t be tagging anyone specifically, but I will take part:

1. I have a chronic problem of starting too many books at once. One to three isn’t too bad, but I often find myself trying to juggle my reading time between six or seven. It’s not particularly fun. You’d think I’d learn, but… nope. The lure is too great!

2. I’m a practicing Buddhist.

3. When I go to put earbud headphones on, I must put the left earbud in first. If, when I lift up one of the earbuds, I find it’s the right one, I put it down, pick up the left one, and put it in. Don’t ask me why. I’ve no idea.

4. I’m a bibliophile. I enjoy buying / collecting books, even if I know I’m not going to ever have enough time to read them all.

5. I typically start my day with a cup of coffee with French vanilla creamer.

6. I generally don’t like fiction books that take place in the present day. I like books set in the past, set in the future, or set in a different world altogether - but I don’t like present day stuff. There are some exceptions, but they’re rare.

7. I can type around 90-95 words a minute, complete with capitalization, punctuation, etc. I never took typing classes; I never used a typing program. Instead, I learned to type “properly” when I was 13 or 14, while spending far too much time hanging out in an IRC channel called #Squareville!.

8. I’m currently attending university full time, pursuing a bachelor’s in history. I’d eventually - years from now - like to teach history at the college level. A few periods of particular interest to me are World War 2, along with the Viking Age.

As I said, I won&